Integration of Passenger Satisfaction in Railway Timetable Rescheduling for Major Disruptions
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Integration of passenger satisfaction in railway timetable rescheduling for major disruptions THÈSE NO 8209 (2018) PRÉSENTÉE LE 26 JANVIER À LA FACULTÉ DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT NATUREL, ARCHITECTURAL ET CONSTRUIT LABORATOIRE TRANSPORT ET MOBILITÉ PROGRAMME DOCTORAL EN GÉNIE CIVIL ET ENVIRONNEMENT ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE POUR L'OBTENTION DU GRADE DE DOCTEUR ÈS SCIENCES PAR Stefan Yves Gabriel BINDER acceptée sur proposition du jury: Prof. D. Lignos, président du jury Prof. M. Bierlaire, directeur de thèse Prof. M. Gendreau, rapporteur Dr M. Laumanns , rapporteur Prof. F. Corman, rapporteur Suisse 2018 “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” — Niels Bohr Acknowledgements I always said I would never do a PhD. Looking back however, I realize that the experience of creating this piece of research work was one amazing journey, and that I do not regret anything about changing my mind. During this extended journey, several people helped, accompanied, supported and encouraged me along the way. I am deeply grateful to all of them, because this thesis would not have been possible without them. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Michel Bierlaire. I would not have accomplished this thesis without his guidance and expertise, which helped me to focus my ideas in the most critical moments of the process. He was always available when I needed advice, and his constructive feedback pushed myself towards excellence. He is not only an outstanding researcher, teacher and mentor to work with, but also an extremely human person. He manages to create a fantastic working environment, as all (former and current) members of the lab can attest. Indeed, it was a real pleasure to share non-academic discussions with him over beers, raclette, fondue bourguignonne, tartare Natasha, and in many more occasions. Besides my supervisor, I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee, Prof. Francesco Corman, Prof. Michel Gendreau and Dr. Marco Laumanns, and the committee president, Prof. Dimitrios Lignos. Their insightful comments helped me to improve the quality of the thesis from several perspectives. I would also like to thank them for making my private defense an enjoyable moment. I am extremely thankful towards my colleagues and friends of the TRANSP-OR lab- oratory. In particular, I would like to thank Jianghang Chen and Yousef Maknoon for their regular supervision during these years. The discussions were sometimes agi- tated, but always useful. I also want to thank all members of the lab for creating the most amazing, cool, awesome, stimulating, fun and friendly work environment I could ever imagine. Without them, I would not have been able to complete this long jour- ney. I thoroughly enjoyed the coffee breaks, the fruit breaks, the lunch breaks (except Epicure), the beers at Sat, the conference trips, the trips to nowhere (Schwarzwald), the skiing, the hiking, the parties, the laughs and all the crazy moments! Thanks to Bilge Atasoy, Mila Bender, Stefano Bortolomiol, Jianghang Chen, Anne Curchod, An- tonin Danalet, Matthieu de Lapparent, Daniel Emery, Anna Fern´andez Antol´ın, Aur´elie Glerum, Flurin H¨anseler, Hainan Hu, Sofia Kalakou, Eva Kazagli, Xinjun Lai, Gael Lederrey, Claudio Leonardi, Virginie Lurkin, Yousef Maknoun, Iliya Markov, Nicolas Molyneaux, Stefano Moret, Marija Nikolic, Nikola Obrenovic, Yuki Oyama, Meritxell Pacheco Paneque, Tom´aˇsRobenek, Marianne Ruegg, Riccardo Scarinci, Shadi Sharif i Acknowledgements Azadeh, Nitish Umang, Zhengchao Wang, and to the members of LUTS laboratory for a great working environment and stimulating seminars. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family in Switzerland and in Austria, and all my friends outside EPFL. I would not have made it without their unconditional support. Best of all, during this thesis I have also met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with: Anna. Thank you for always being here for me, especially during the long last months of the writing process. You constantly reminded me how much there is still to discover after a PhD, and I cannot wait to explore it with you! Lausanne, December 1st, 2017 Stefan Binder ii Abstract Unexpected disruptions occur for many reasons in railway networks and cause delays, cancellations, and, eventually, passenger inconvenience. This thesis focuses on the rail- way timetable rescheduling problem from a macroscopic point of view in case of large disruptions, such as track unavailabilities due to, e.g., rolling stock malfunction or ad- verse weather conditions. Its originality is to consider three objectives when designing the so-called disposition timetable: the passenger satisfaction, the operational cost and the deviation from the undisrupted timetable. These goals are usually incompatible: for instance, the best possible service for the passengers may also be the most expensive option for the railway operator. This inadequacy is the key motivation for this thesis. The problem is formally defined as a multi-objective Integer Linear Program and solved to optimality on realistic instances. In order to understand the trade-offs between the objectives, the three-dimensional Pareto frontier is approximated using ε-constraints. The results on a Dutch case study indicate that adopting a demand-oriented approach for the management of disruptions not only is possible, but may lead to significant improvement in passenger satisfaction, associated with a low operational cost. For a more efficient investigation of the multiple dimensions of the problem, a heuristic solution algorithm based on adaptive large neighborhood search is also presented. The timetable is optimized using operators inspired directly from recovery strategies used in practice (such as canceling, delaying or rerouting trains, or scheduling additional trains and buses), and from optimization methods (e.g., feasibility restoration operators). Results on a Swiss case study indicate that the proposed solution approach performs well on large-scale problems, in terms of computational time and solution quality. In addition, a flexible network loading framework, defining priorities among passengers for the capacitated passenger assignment problem, is introduced. Being efficient and pro- ducing stable aggregate passenger satisfaction indicators (such as average travel time), it is used in an iterative manner for the evaluation from the passenger perspective of the timetable provided by the rescheduling meta-heuristic. The timetable rescheduling problem is a hard problem and this thesis makes significant methodological and practical contributions to the design of passenger-centric disposition timetables. It is the first attempt to explicitly integrate multiple objectives in a single framework for railway timetable rescheduling, as the state-of-the-art usually neglects passenger considerations, or considers them only implicitly. Further, the use of practice- inspired optimization methods allows railway operators to easily implement the results of the proposed framework. iii Abstract ee Keywords: railway timetable rescheduling, passenger demand model, capacitated pas- senger assignment, Pareto frontier approximation, meta-heuristic, integer linear pro- gram. R´esum´e: Cette th`ese porte sur le probl`eme de l’optimisation de l’horaire dans le cas d’une perturbation majeure affectant un r´eseau ferroviaire. En particulier, elle d´emontre la pertinence de l’int´egration des flux de passagers dans le mod`ele pour une optimisation judicieuse de l’horaire. Le probl`eme est analys´een d´etail pour deux cas d’´etude, l’un aux Pays-Bas, l’autre en Suisse. Zusammenfassung: Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Optimierung des Fahrplans in Eisenbahnnetzwerken, in denen bedeutende Betriebsst¨orungen aufgetreten sind. Ins- besondere zeigt sie auf, dass die Ber¨ucksichtigung von Passagierfl¨ussen massgebend f¨ur eine sinnvolle Optimierung des Fahrplans ist. Zwei Fallstudien (in den Niederlanden und in der Schweiz) untersuchen das Problem ausf¨uhrlich. iv Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation ................................... 1 1.2 Objectives.................................... 5 1.3 Scientificcontributions. ... 5 1.4 Thesisstructure................................. 7 2 Context and case studies 9 2.1 Railway disruption management in practice: a real example........ 10 2.2 Literaturereview ................................ 14 2.3 Casestudiesusedthroughoutthisthesis . ...... 21 Appendix 25 3 The multi-objective railway timetable rescheduling problem 31 3.1 Introduction................................... 31 3.2 Problemdescription .............................. 33 3.3 Space-timegraph................................ 36 3.4 ILPFormulation ................................ 39 3.5 Numericalexperiments. 45 3.6 Concludingremarks .............................. 51 Appendix 54 4 An exogenous capacitated passenger assignment methodology 55 4.1 Introduction................................... 55 4.2 Literaturereview ................................ 57 4.3 Problemdescription .............................. 61 4.4 Exogenouspassengerprioritylists. ...... 66 4.5 Passengerassignmentalgorithm. .... 69 4.6 Casestudy ................................... 75 4.7 Concludingremarks .............................. 88 v CONTENTS Appendix 91 5 An adaptive large neighborhood meta-heuristic for railway timetable rescheduling 95 5.1 Introduction................................... 95 5.2 Problemformulation .............................. 97 5.3 Solutionalgorithm